Anton Jäger's book lauded as 'groundbreaking' in Guardian profile

The Guardian profiles Anton Jäger, 32, whose new book Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences is being widely read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. The New York Times called the book “among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the political present in all its maddening strangeness.” Jäger, raised in Brussels by parents who work in the arts, studied at the University of Essex and Cambridge and is now a lecturer in the history of political thought and theory at University College, Oxford. He cites Deleuze and Guattari, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau as influences and describes himself simply as a Marxist. Jäger’s central argument periodizes the last century: 1914 to 1989 as an age of mass politics with high politicisation and institutionalisation; 1989 to about 2008 as an age of post-politics with low politicisation; and 2008 through roughly 2020 as an age of anti-politics marked by resurgent protest movements that sometimes produced parties. The profile opens with Andy Burnham’s remark outside 10 Downing Street and notes that Jäger’s book has generated rapid attention on the left and among Labour observers.